Setting word wrapping and line breaks in text file

General Questions
#1

I’m hoping somebody can help me with this.

I’m editing some text documents in WordPad. I want to save the text as close to plain text as possible without a bunch of HTML commands embedded in it. My problem is the original text does not have any breaks between lines. I want to break each line at around seventy-two characters (without splitting words however).

I can set the ruler at seventy-two characters and use the Word Wrap feature to set the text so each line breaks there. But it only displays the text that way; it doesn’t save the breaks.

I can go through and manually break each line but I’m hoping there’s an easier way. Is there any way that I can break the lines and then save the text with the breaks?

#2

This online tool isn’t great, but it will probably do the job:

http://tools.zenverse.net/word-wrap/



000000000111111111122222222223333333333444444444455555555556666666666777
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012
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I'm hoping somebody can help me with this. I'm editing some text
documents in WordPad. I want to save the text as close to plain text as
possible without a bunch of HTML commands embedded in it. My problem is
the original text does not have any breaks between lines. I want to
break each line at around seventy-two characters (without splitting
words however). I can set the ruler at seventy-two characters and use
the Word Wrap feature to set the text so each line breaks there. But it
only displays the text that way; it doesn't save the breaks. I can go
through and manually break each line but I'm hoping there's an easier
way. Is there any way that I can break the lines and then save the text
with the breaks?

Otherwise, most free text processors (Notepad++, TextWrangler if you’re on a Mac) will do this as well. They might be worth downloading if you mess with text regularly.

#3

If you’re OK with using the command line, you could use fmt:


fmt -w72 input.txt >output.txt

I take it you’re using Microsoft Windows, in which case you can probably get the version of fmt included with Cygwin.